Computer memory, that is!! I am working my way through a backlog of books that I have accumulated over the past eighteen months, the latest one of which is Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson (no relation to the vacuum manufacture).
Not a straightforward history of computing book. But more an investigation into the backgrounds of who was who in the various developments of calculating/computing machines over time, which has led us to where we are today and how a group of people wanted to build a computer that would make Alan Turing’s theory of a ‘universal machine’ reality.
I am only halfway through it, as I can’t stop going to search the internet to look up information relative to the progress of the story. Having worked with computers since I was seventeen after joining the Royal Navy in 1964 it’s fascinating to learn more about how the theories of such things as computer memory became reality.
To show one example of how far computer memory has come, here is an image of an original Ferrite Ring core memory, showing 64 cores in an 8 by 8 matrix to hold just eight bytes!
On top of it is an 8 GB SanDisk memory card, one billion time more memory in one quarter of the area taking up by the Ferrite Core matrix!
Of course this is an old picture, I saw an article last week about a 1.5 TB SanDisk memory card! There are other larger cards with higher capacities, but it’s amazing to see this amount of storage packed into such a small space. What would Alan Turing have made of this?
Beasley's Place 